After playing with the materialize module, I realized that displacement used there is actually showing up in the viewport and you can control tesselation density and displacement strength.
I assume there is a good reason, why you cannot display displacement the same way in the Layering modules viewport for texture painting?
I mean, if you could, you would essentially be able to not just texture, but also live sculpt in instamat, using all brushes and graphs, but would still be good to know if there is a way to correctly display a height map, as of know it only displays as a normal/bump layer and I´m not sure what the use of it is there (apart from using an existing heightmap for height based masking/blending).
Displacement is disabled in the viewport in Layering projects however if you would like to visualize the displacement in the viewport, you could drag your layering project into the Canvas in an Element graph and preview the results there by loading the mesh and adjusting the displacement settings in the Viewport Settings panel.
Ah, thanks for the idea.
Still need way more time to get used to all the ways layering projects and canvas can overlap…
Since I never had any of these features at my disposal, I´m just so used to texturing with JUST painting basically, that I need to do a lot of experimenting to figure out how they can enhance each other.
Its a good workaround for now, but ultimately…do you see a chance of enabling displacement in layering projects, or is that not on the roadmap yet?
Like I said: I don´t really understand the underlying technical issues, just trying to get an idea so I know where I should focus on next in my experiments.
While instamat probably isn´t planning to make sculpting apps redundant any time soon, I really think that texturing/surfacing with high frequency details should go hand in hand for the best results and instamat has a LOT more options and better workflows for that already.
I mean, there is always a very fine line for me between “I wanna see this properly displaced” and “this could totally be a normal map and nobody would notice the difference”.
I’m glad the workaround is working! It really depends on the workflow and the use case for the end result. I’ll loop in @voidberg about viewing displacement in the viewport for Layering projects.
Displacement in layering has a lot of potential, it could indeed be used to do a limited form of sculpting.
The reason it is not yet supported is that our viewport currently currently does not support crack-free displacement, meaning that UV seams would likely break up when vertices displace with a slight difference. Using a technique such as POM (parallax occlusion mapping) will also not work for as the image-space ray casting would yield bad results as we cannot ray-march past the UV shell boundary.
I think it’s a good case for a feature-request though, if it’s important to the community we can add crack-free displacement to the viewport sooner than we planned for it.
